Seung LeeOctober 6, 2017 at 9:46 AMWith Bruce Sewell set to retire by the end of the year, Apple has hired Katherine Adams as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security.

Adams was general counsel at Honeywell, the New Jersey-based conglomerate whose companies span aerospace, construction and materials technologies, from 2008 to 2017.

“Apple has had a tremendous impact on the world and it’s an honor to join their team,” said Adams in a company post. “I’m excited to help Apple continue to grow and evolve around the world, protecting their ideas and IP, and defending our shared values.”

Formerly of Honeywell, Katherine Adams will take over as Apple’s new general counsel. (Courtesy Apple)

Before joining Honeywell, Adams was a partner at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP in New York City. She also worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and attorney for the United States Department of Justice. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who then was chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Adams will be reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We are thrilled to welcome Kate to our team,” said Cook. “She’s a seasoned leader with outstanding judgment and that has worked on a wide variety of legal cases globally. Throughout her career she’s also been an advocate on many of the values we at Apple hold dear.”

Adams will replace Sewell, who has been with the Cupertino tech giant since 2009. Sewell joined Apple from Intel.

“To have worked with this amazing executive team and all the incredibly smart people at Apple, especially my colleagues in legal and global security, has been the honor of a lifetime,” said Sewell. “The years I have spent in this job have been the most gratifying of my career. I’m delighted Kate is joining and I know she will be a huge asset.”

Sewell has been at the forefront of many of Apple’s biggest legal cases. After the San Bernardino mass shooting, Sewell testified on behalf of Apple to Congress last year about encryption because Apple would not unlock the iPhone of the shooter for the FBI.

Through Sewell, Apple has been fighting legal battles with Samsung and Qualcomm. For the former, the five-year-long lawsuit was over design patent infringements over smartphones and tablets. For the latter, Apple sued Qualcomm after accusing it of running an extortion scheme over its smartphone royalties in January and cut off payments three months later. In July, Qualcomm sued back, claiming copyright infringement.

Apple v. Qualcomm is expected to go to trial in San Diego next year, meaning it will be Adams, not Sewell, who will be leading the charge.

Photo: Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, right, laughs with CEO Tim Cook. Sewell, who joined Apple in 2009, is retiring at the end of the year. (Courtesy Apple)

Apple hires Katherine Adams as general counsel to replace retiring Bruce SewellSeung LeeOctober 6, 2017 at 9:46 AMWith Bruce Sewell set to retire by the end of the year, Apple has hired Katherine Adams as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security.

Adams was general counsel at Honeywell, the New Jersey-based conglomerate whose companies span aerospace, construction and materials technologies, from 2008 to 2017.

“Apple has had a tremendous impact on the world and it’s an honor to join their team,” said Adams in a company post. “I’m excited to help Apple continue to grow and evolve around the world, protecting their ideas and IP, and defending our shared values.”

Formerly of Honeywell, Katherine Adams will take over as Apple’s new general counsel. (Courtesy Apple)

Before joining Honeywell, Adams was a partner at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP in New York City. She also worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and attorney for the United States Department of Justice. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who then was chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Adams will be reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We are thrilled to welcome Kate to our team,” said Cook. “She’s a seasoned leader with outstanding judgment and that has worked on a wide variety of legal cases globally. Throughout her career she’s also been an advocate on many of the values we at Apple hold dear.”

Adams will replace Sewell, who has been with the Cupertino tech giant since 2009. Sewell joined Apple from Intel.

“To have worked with this amazing executive team and all the incredibly smart people at Apple, especially my colleagues in legal and global security, has been the honor of a lifetime,” said Sewell. “The years I have spent in this job have been the most gratifying of my career. I’m delighted Kate is joining and I know she will be a huge asset.”

Sewell has been at the forefront of many of Apple’s biggest legal cases. After the San Bernardino mass shooting, Sewell testified on behalf of Apple to Congress last year about encryption because Apple would not unlock the iPhone of the shooter for the FBI.

Through Sewell, Apple has been fighting legal battles with Samsung and Qualcomm. For the former, the five-year-long lawsuit was over design patent infringements over smartphones and tablets. For the latter, Apple sued Qualcomm after accusing it of running an extortion scheme over its smartphone royalties in January and cut off payments three months later. In July, Qualcomm sued back, claiming copyright infringement.

Apple v. Qualcomm is expected to go to trial in San Diego next year, meaning it will be Adams, not Sewell, who will be leading the charge.

Photo: Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, right, laughs with CEO Tim Cook. Sewell, who joined Apple in 2009, is retiring at the end of the year. (Courtesy Apple)

Apple hires Katherine Adams as general counsel to replace retiring Bruce SewellSeung LeeOctober 6, 2017 at 9:46 AMWith Bruce Sewell set to retire by the end of the year, Apple has hired Katherine Adams as general counsel and senior vice president of Legal and Global Security.

Adams was general counsel at Honeywell, the New Jersey-based conglomerate whose companies span aerospace, construction and materials technologies, from 2008 to 2017.

“Apple has had a tremendous impact on the world and it’s an honor to join their team,” said Adams in a company post. “I’m excited to help Apple continue to grow and evolve around the world, protecting their ideas and IP, and defending our shared values.”

Formerly of Honeywell, Katherine Adams will take over as Apple’s new general counsel. (Courtesy Apple)

Before joining Honeywell, Adams was a partner at Sidley Austin Brown & Wood LLP in New York City. She also worked as a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and attorney for the United States Department of Justice. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who then was chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Adams will be reporting directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We are thrilled to welcome Kate to our team,” said Cook. “She’s a seasoned leader with outstanding judgment and that has worked on a wide variety of legal cases globally. Throughout her career she’s also been an advocate on many of the values we at Apple hold dear.”

Adams will replace Sewell, who has been with the Cupertino tech giant since 2009. Sewell joined Apple from Intel.

“To have worked with this amazing executive team and all the incredibly smart people at Apple, especially my colleagues in legal and global security, has been the honor of a lifetime,” said Sewell. “The years I have spent in this job have been the most gratifying of my career. I’m delighted Kate is joining and I know she will be a huge asset.”

Sewell has been at the forefront of many of Apple’s biggest legal cases. After the San Bernardino mass shooting, Sewell testified on behalf of Apple to Congress last year about encryption because Apple would not unlock the iPhone of the shooter for the FBI.

Through Sewell, Apple has been fighting legal battles with Samsung and Qualcomm. For the former, the five-year-long lawsuit was over design patent infringements over smartphones and tablets. For the latter, Apple sued Qualcomm after accusing it of running an extortion scheme over its smartphone royalties in January and cut off payments three months later. In July, Qualcomm sued back, claiming copyright infringement.

Apple v. Qualcomm is expected to go to trial in San Diego next year, meaning it will be Adams, not Sewell, who will be leading the charge.

Photo: Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell, right, laughs with CEO Tim Cook. Sewell, who joined Apple in 2009, is retiring at the end of the year. (Courtesy Apple)

Bruce Sewell also led fight against FBI demand for help breaking iPhone encryption.. Mr Sewell’s departure comes as Apple is taking on Qualcomm on several fronts, accusing the chipmaker of overcharging for its wireless modem technology and patents, in a legal battle that has also embroiled several of the iPhone’s top suppliers in Asia.

Its patent battle against Samsung over iPhone designs is still rolling through the courts.

Apple is also fighting the European Commission over what Brussels claims is €13bn in illegal tax benefits from Ireland. This week, the EU said it would take Ireland to court to force it to recover the sum from Apple.

“The move takes on greater significance given the number of battles Apple is facing in and out of the courtroom,” said Neil Cybart, an Apple analyst at Above Avalon.

“While there is never a perfect time for such a transition, it makes sense for Apple to pass on the baton to a new general counsel sooner rather than later given the company’s intensifying war with Qualcomm.”

Mr Cook said in a statement on Friday that he was thrilled to welcome Ms Adams, who will help steer the company’s legal strategy on issues ranging from customer privacy to intellectual property.

Sewell’s Bloomberg interview was back in August and it just “saw the light of day” this week... and **bingo** Sewell remarkably departs. A coincidence.... I think not.

I found the interview odd and out of character but the fact is that this case is isnt as big a deal to Apple as it is to Qualcomm. I have my doubts that missteps in an interview on this case would get him thrown out.

Who knows though? Both sides have now changed out their top lawyers so maybe a fresh set of eyes on both sides figures out a path out of this mess.

I agree that the case is bigger for Q than Apple, but I disagree that Sewell's comments were unrelated to his departure. His quote linking Apple to the Korean investigation by urging Samsung on may be the strangest admission of a general counsel in,a long time and will be a feeding ground for Q's lawyers. That Korean investigation may well be totally corrupt as is evidenced by the anti corruption prosecutions that the new South Korean government is pursuing against the Samsung insider family member.. Strange, very strange. Hf

Max Chafkin, a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, discusses the ongoing legal fight between Apple and Qualcomm over the chipmaker’s practice of charging royalties of up to 5 percent of the average selling price of the phone in exchange for the technology that allows most smartphones to send and receive data. He speaks with Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr on Bloomberg Radio’s Bloomberg Law.

New research puts annual licensing return from mobile market at $14.3 billion or just over $7 a phone04OCT 16 Next > < Previous < Back to BlogsRichard Lloyd

Exactly how much is being made from licensing patents to mobile phone manufacturers has become a touchstone issue in recent years leading to some wildly different numbers. The perceived power that the likes of Qualcomm, Nokia and Ericsson hold over the manufacturing community was underlined by a 2014 paper from WilmerHale and Intel which estimated that on a hypothetical $400 phone the royalty stack could be in excess of $120.

But according to a new paper, which studied the licensing revenues of 32 major licensors to the mobile sector, the royalty stack is likely to be much lower, accounting for just $14.3 billion in annual licensing revenues or 3.3% of the total value of the smartphone and feature phone markets in 2015. The paper, “A new dataset on mobile phone patent license royalties”, calculates that that translates to just $7.25 of the average sales price of a phone of $221.80.

The authors – Professor Stephen Haber of Stanford, Professor Alexander Galetovic of the Universidad de los Andes in Chile and Lew Zaretski, the head of IP strategy firm Hamilton IPV – make clear that they are not taking a position on the level of the royalty rate. However, in joining the band of academics attempting to throw some light on this opaque subject, the trio are clearly trying to prove that the concern that patent owners are subjecting the likes of Apple and Samsung to unduly high licensing rates is unfounded.

The problem for anyone looking to apply rigorous analysis to licensing rates is that most deals remain private. As a result, the paper’s authors use a mixture of publicly available material, such as financial disclosures from the largest licensors like Qualcomm, other material they can glean from the public record and estimates from those businesses where licensing revenues are not materially significant and are therefore not disclosed in financial filings. The authors appear acutely aware of the challenges and limitations in calculating licensing revenues and in the interests of full transparency include an excel spreadsheet which details all of the underlying data and their sources.

In one interesting side note, the paper estimates that Huawei is earning, just on its mobile phone patents, roughly 20% of all patent revenues earned by all Chinese companies in any line of economic activity. That shows the company’s undoubted status, in patent terms at least, as China’s most powerful tech company, but also the embryonic status of the country’s outbound licensing market.

I got in touch with Professor Haber and asked him why the authors had decided to write the paper. “We were motivated to undertake the study because all kinds of numbers about the "royalty stack" in a mobile phone get tossed around among academics, industry practitioners, and government officials--but many of those numbers are not generated by a theoretically-informed, empirically sound, and replicable method,” he wrote in an email. “Science has to start with the facts; with evidence dispassionately gathered. Our purpose is to provide as comprehensive, transparent, and theoretically informed data source as is practically possible for use by other researchers, industry practitioners, and government officials. As our paper states: "We do not take a position on whether the estimates of the royalty yield we present in this study are 'too high,' 'too low,' or 'just right.' That is an important debate, but it can only be joined on the basis of evidence."

Haber points out that the authors are building on the work of others (the paper cites previous studies by Keith Mallinson and J Gregory Sidak) so they are not the first to contradict the sky-high royalty estimates made by some. Such is the nature of this debate that it will likely run for a little while yet, but this latest piece is a valuable contribution to a very hot topic.

His quote linking Apple to the Korean investigation by urging Samsung on may be the strangest admission of a general counsel in,a long time and will be a feeding ground for Q's lawyers.Yep, and also extremely unusual to give an explicit dollar amount that Apple is aiming for.

Maybe that was enough to get him fired even if the case is much less important to Apple? I cant say I have any real insight into the internal politics at Apple and whether he was well regarded.